Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.

I think rituals are important, rituals that mark the passage of time. Well, it’s just time, I hear you say, just a man-made construct. Our lives run in tandem with a certain perception of time as backdrop — for most of us, that’s “clock time”. Even then, that has been quite forcefully upended by the proliferation of async communication channels of... See more